Archive for May, 2014

Tolkien’s ‘Beowulf’ Translation Published J.R.R. Tolkien finished a translation of the epic “Beowulf” in 1926, when he was 34, but he put it in a drawer and never published it. Forty years after his death, his son Christopher is releasing it. “[T]here were probably few people better qualified to translate ‘Beowulf’ than J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien,” writes Joan Acocella for the New Yorker. “He had learned Old English and started reading the poem at an early age. He loved ‘Beowulf’ and would declaim passages of it to the private literary club that he had founded with his schoolmates.”

National Spelling Bee: It’s a Tie! For the first time in 52 years, the Scripps National Spelling Bee crowned two winners Thursday night, after the final two competitors exhausted the word list. The winners were Sriram Hathwar, an eighth-grader from Painted Post, New York, and Ansun Sujoe, a seventh-grader from Fort Worth, Texas. “I like sharing the victory with someone else,” Ansun said. “It’s been quite shocking and quite interesting, too. It’s very rare.”

Issa releases Kerry from Benghazi testimony WASHINGTON (AP) — The chairman of the House Oversight committee on Friday released Secretary of State John Kerry from his obligation to testify next month about the deadly Benghazi attack, allowing a newly formed select committee to move forward in questioning the top diplomat.

Weekly Standard writer and Fox News contributor Stephen Hayes broke ranks from his fellow conservatives and colleagues at Fox by agreeing with Hillary Clinton’s assessment that her critics have mischaracterized her congressional testimony on the Benghazi attacks.

On May 30 Politico publishedadvance excerpts from Clinton’s upcoming memoir, Hard Choices, in which she details her time at the State Department during the attacks in Benghazi and criticizes Republican efforts to exploit the tragedy. Writing on her congressional testimony on the attacks, Clinton argued that the controversy surrounding her response to a question from Sen. Ron Johnson is “yet another example of the terrible politicization of this tragedy.” Clinton points out that her”what difference at this point does it make” statement did not “mean that I was somehow minimizing the tragedy of Benghazi” and that “many of those trying to make hay of it know that, but don’t care.”

In a May 30 post at TheWeekly Standard, Hayes agreed that Clinton’s critics have “badly mischaracterized the now infamous question.” Hayes went on to correctly note that Clinton’s response was simply “an attempt to redirect the questioning from its focus on the hours before the attacks to preventing similar attacks in the future”:

Hillary Clinton is right about Benghazi — or at least she’s right about one thing.

According to a story by Maggie Haberman about the Benghazi chapter in Clinton’s forthcoming book Hard Choices, the former secretary of state contends that some of her critics have badly mischaracterized the now infamous question she asked at a January 23, 2012, congressional hearing: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

She’s right, they have. The question, which came in the middle of a heated back-and-forth with U.S. senator Ron Johnson, was not so much a declaration of indifference as it was an attempt to redirect the questioning from its focus on the hours before the attacks to preventing similar attacks in the future.

Hayes has previously defended Clinton from attacks mischarcterizing her exchange. On the April 30 edition of Hannity, Hayes stood up for Clinton against those who labeled her attitude about the attack as indifferent and again corrected the record:

HAYES: Let me start by actually defending Hillary Clinton, which I don’t do often in the context of Benghazi. You know, that sound bite has been, I think, misinterpreted by some to be a declaration of her indifference as to what had actually happened on the ground in Benghazi when she says, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” She wasn’t saying, basically, I don’t care, you know, we’re beyond it, it doesn’t matter. What she was saying is it doesn’t matter how it happened.

Despite Hayes’ correction to critics who willfully misinterpreted Clinton’s words, conservatives continue to hold up her remarks as a false indication of indifference.

Is Obama Blundering Into a Syrian Quagmire? Pat Buchanan, RealClearPoliticsWith his address at West Point, President Obama succeeded where all his previous efforts had failed. He brought us together. Nobody seems to have liked the speech. A glance shows that the New York Times and Washington Times, the Financial Times and Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal were all disappointed with it. As was said of one of Harding’s addresses, it was “an army of pompous phrases marching across the landscape in search of an idea.” What Obama has is less a foreign policy doctrine than a foreign policy disposition. He is a reluctant interventionist. He got us out of Iraq…

There is deep racial bias in our economy, as evidenced by the fact that online buyers shy away from doing business with black sellers and offer them less money when they do interact.

In a year-long experiment, researchers posted ads on online marketplaces like Craigslist selling an old iPod with a picture of the seller holding it, with either a black person or white person’s hand pictured. They also posted ads with a white hand that had a wrist tattoo, which the authors posited might experience similar discrimination to black people and could serve as a control group.

CREDIT: Jennifer L. Doleac & Luke C.D. Stein

“Our paper asks the following question,” the authors write. “When the typical person engages in a consumer transaction (usually as a buyer), does he or she try to avoid dealing with minority sellers, and does she treat minority sellers differently?” The answer appears to be yes.

Black sellers got 13 percent fewer responses to their ads than white sellers overall. When they did get responses, they got 17 percent fewer offers. Then the offers were 2 to 4 percent lower, or $1.87 less on average than those made to white sellers. The best offers were also $3.56 lower than for white people.

The researchers also found that buyers were less respectful and more distrustful with black sellers. About 7 percent fewer people signed their names when responding to a black person. They were 44 percent less likely to accept delivery by mail and 56 percent more likely to be concerned about paying long distance, such as through PayPal, both of which include a bit more risk than an in-person hand off.

And even those who weren’t responding treated black sellers differently. Ads on these sites can be flagged as inappropriate and they will be taken down if enough people flag them. And black people’s ads were removed in this way 2.7 percent more often that for white people, so “the likelihood is thus almost twice as high that a black seller’s ad will be removed,” the authors note.

These findings my seem incidental, occurring just between online sellers and buyers, but they indicate something larger. As the authors explain, “First, a large amount of commerce takes places through these kinds of transactions. Second, discrimination by consumers may in fact underlie other forms of discrimination.” Given that most online sales require an eventual real life meet up to complete the transaction, “we expect that our results will be informative about discrimination offline,” they write. And if people shy away from buying things from black sellers, that could shape decisions made by actual retail companies when hiring sales people. One study found that consumer discrimination is the most likely cause of racial differences in the economy.

The results of the study can help illuminate why unemployment has consistently been significantly higher for black people than for white people, both during recessions and boom times. This is true even for college graduates, who have had higher unemployment rates for decades. Even 40 percent of recent college who do get jobs end up working in low-paying positions that don’t make use of their degrees.

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On Sept. 11th, 2001 George Bush said he would catch bin Laden dead or alive.
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The Hollywood Liberal started in 2004 at the height of the Bush Administration madness in America.
We were inspired by the late great Bartcop.com. The very first thing I did when the site started was to get arrested at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. My arrest at the start of a march from The World Trade Center was later ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge. On New Years Eve 2014 the case was finally settled, with a judge awarding a class action suit that I was part of over $26 Million. I posted daily on the blog up until the end of The Bush error, and the site is now run as a history of the whole fiasco. Feel free to browse the old postings, pictures, & comics (an HL favorite) It reveals the twisted history of the times. Thanks H.L.